One-shotting Fiends - by the numbers

Hi /r/eve, I am corpmate of Velsharoon, who, as you probably know, lost his Fiend to a Hel and a Sabre. I am bad storyteller, but pretty good at number crunching. As I found it hard to believe that afterburning Fiend could be one-shot by a super, I ran a quick analysis on the data available. Final result is that I strongly believe that the Fiend died due to some kind of bug which is connected to the failed attempt of ship to enter warp. Long version is following, so that anyone can check my conclusions.

velsh's relevant skills: all 5 except for tactical shield manipulation which is 4

velsh recently had bugs where his modules went offline after jump. He's watching them closely after that, but he's a human, mistakes are possible, so have to take that into consideration too

First thing I noticed is "invulnerability" entry in the log before the Fiend received 3rd volley. One of things which could hint at buggy situation, but could be explained by asynchronous logging/event handling by EVE client too.

Second thing I noticed is discrepancy of 519 between total damage taken and fiend raw HP:

It could be explained by having less than 100% shield, having some of damage going through last 5% of shield (TSM 4), some of damage going through last 25% of armor (is it still a thing? Ships still have armorUniformity set to 0.75, so could be) or some kind of bug. Hard to figure out, so we have to take into account all possibilities. Fortunately, for many of our considerations it will not matter.

Let's find out EM resists of the Fiend:

shield:

EM amp offline, invuln inactive: 20%

EM amp offline, invuln active: 57.5%

EM amp offline, invuln heated: 65%

EM amp online, invuln inactive: 65.1%

EM amp online, invuln active: 79.3182597%

EM amp online, invuln heated: 82.1619116%

armor: 50%

hull: 33%

1st volley definitely hit shields only, even if 519 shield was missing (3477 - 519 = 2958 which is higher than shown 1797 volley amount). Following is list of pre-resist post-mitigation damage applied to the Fiend:

EM amp offline, invuln inactive: 2246.25

EM amp offline, invuln active: 4228.235294118

EM amp offline, invuln heated: 5134.285714286

EM amp online, invuln inactive: 5148.99713467

EM amp online, invuln active: 8688.82392842

EM amp online, invuln heated: 10073.949403682

We know that the Hel had 3 tracking-scripted faction omnilinks. I wasn't able to get any extra info on the Hel fit, so we have just that. While variability here is high, I can attempt to minimize amount of combinations we have to worry about. First approach is to assume "realistic" worst-case for the Fiend - it would mean 4 faction DDAs and 5% damage implant (5th low would be DC or inertia stabilizer), which results in 11192 raw volley. Based on that, we can find how much speed did the Fiend have when it received the volley, for each possible resist mod state:

"-" is to keep in mind that if the Hel had less powerful volley - the Fiend needed less mitigation/speed to receive the same damage. Application graph for reference.

Second approach is to assume that there was some kind of bug which led to Hel applying 100% of its damage, and try to play with fit to get volley which is close to any of those listed above. After spending some time in pyfa, I think it could be Hel fit with 3 faction DDAs, 5% drone damage implant and heavy fighters skill at 4 - it would result in 10066 volley damage, which is fairly close to "EM amp online, invuln heated" variant (which coincides to Velsh's claims that his invuln was heated). Difference can be explained by rounding in damage log (round/ceil/floor, idk which is used) or rounding in my calculations. Heavy fighters 4 can be explained by use of t1 heavy fighters just this year (seen in Hel pilot losses). I couldn't make anything else which makes sense and has volley close to any of those numbers.

We could get some more data from 2nd and 3rd volley - and I tried, but given that shield/armor penetration are possible and are random, it's hard to draw any semi-reliable conclusions from that.

Out of all the available data I can conclude that either Velsh is extremely bad pilot who spaced out for 7+ seconds after sabre stopped his attempt to warp with 2nd bubble, slowed down from 2.5-3 km/s to 280 m/s and got one-shot, or that there's some bug in play, where attempt to warp stops your ship like you normally do the moment you enter warp, bubble cancels warp and you receive damage like you had zero speed despite having 2k+ speed before making an attempt. Knowing Velsh as massive fagpilot with excellent execution, I'd say the former is very unlikely. And I am sad to see shiny ships dying not due to being outplayed (like was the case with velsh's Imp), but due to bugs in EVE's code.

I went into the querious pocket looking to get a couple more killmarks, caught a vni in their staging and was fragging that for a couple minutes, while doing so i noticed a couple supers, nag and devoter appear on dscan in direction of the gate/keepstar. Once the vni died i warped my bifrost to get eyes on the gate and see what was there, on gate was only the nag and devoter which neither is spooky to the fiend, so i jump gate with bifrost to check other side and once i see its clear i warp the fiend to the gate to start my 4j journey home.

The devoter jumps with the bifrost and immediately bubbles up giving himself agro, i jump with fiend and burn off and warp to a celestial close to the oputgate and warp my bifrost to that gate to check if its clear, while im landing on the celestial with fiend the devoter lands on outgate, knowing he just had his bubble up and has agression i boosh him off the outgate to 100km and burn bifrost back to gate to jump and make sure other side is clear, all clear so i warp fiend to gate and repeat process for next gate.

On the other side of the next gate is a hel and sabre with a bubble already up, i see the hel has fighters deployed which are 3x Ametat II and 2x Templar II, which are positioned on the gate at 0. I decloak my bifrost and start burning off in an attempt to pull the fighters and sabre off the gate as my fiend as landing, the sabre burned off chasing, and launching another bubble.

I jump the fiend into the hel and sabre and the sabre immediately turns round and starts burning to the gate, i align to the closest celestial to my spawn position on the gate, which was an unfortunate spawn between the hel and the sabre. I heated my ab and invuln and started burning out of the bubbles and ready to warp to celestial while locking the sabre for a defensive scram, the sabre gets to 11km from me before im able to pick up enough speed to start pulling range on him, so i was obviously going a decent speed by this time, most likely 3k/s+.

I get outside of the bubble when the sabre is ~15km from me and i right clook moon and initiate warp, the sound notification for entering warp happens and i even exclaim on comms that im out, within the same tick the sabre launches a bubble and cancels it, and instantly afterwards, not even 2 seconds later, the hel volleys me with its initial shot. There is no possible way i couldve been going less than 2k/s due to how quickly after my warp being cancelled i died, and my invuln was heated as well as my ab for the entire time after jumping through the gate.

The Fiend has been on grid with supers before, for long periods of time and has never had this sort of issue before. I was 100% confident of survival in the situation and am still 100% confident that the ship shouldnt have even been close to volleyed in that scenario, the application numbers just dont make any sense, unfortunately i dont record after losing all my imp footage, but i trust people would believe, after flying that ship daily for almost 2 months, and putting it in the most risky situations possible, i wouldnt be retarded enough to mwd off a gate that has a single hel with heavy fighters out and an irrelevant sabre, nor would i just sit there ctrl spaced for multiple seconds after my warp had been cancelled.

EDIT: I forgot to add that i was undoubtedly at 100% HP when i got volleyed, so the numbers for how much damage my ship had taken were less than the ships total HP, which also just doesnt make any sense.

This is going to sound odd, but I suspect the nature of the kill is as such:

Grid changes like Warps and such act as minor session changes on the same node from the client side, working like a small session change on the same node (like undocking).

There are several known and reproduce-able bugs, of the race-condition type, existing around these mini-session changes (leaving grid, landing on grid).

The basic jist of the bug, is that the client state and the server state become de-sync'd, and strangeness results from this. Results I have seen some this are:

Missing Items until client session change (Dock, System Change, re-log).Inability to launch fighters and other modal client state changes.

Thus, I suspect the issue is as such. This type of race condition happened during the small window where a module was being reactivated on the client side, however the attempt to leave grid was timed in such as way that the client believed the module turned on, but the server did not (classic race-condition).

This is not unheard of behavior. TiDi warriors would be familiar with this general situation, as it is almost the same thing as red-cycling modules in tidi. In both cases, the cause is the de-sync from the game state. In TiDi, the server is not processing the commands the player sends, in race-condition states, the situation is the reverse, and the client thinks something happened that did not.

The invulnerability line in the log is a perfect example of this. Both clients hit the same race condition, in that they had decided somehow that the ship was warping, and then later it was not.

On the topic of tank-bleeding. My understanding from long ago is that tank-bleed does not reduce total ehp.

[Thinking about it more, the client has few restrictions on activating tank modules in-space, and the race-condition might have nulled ship velocity for 1tick instead or bugged out the prop mod]